Justin The Wise

Our friends had us over for a very nice dinner tonight. They have two kids whom are both very sweet and polite and all in all are much more presentable to guests than I ever was as a kid. Their son Justin who is 11 (or 12?) and I have a little bit of a mutual fan club. He thinks I’m very funny, and faithfully reads my blog, so I’m going to go ahead and put him in my will until/unless my niece and nephews start sucking up a little more and working for the money. I think he is very funny and a good kid.

Last time I saw Justin we discussed his school’s student government; you cannot believe how poorly Montgomery County is treating these kids. I let him know about civil disobedience and his right to protest unfair policies and lousy food in the cafeteria by staging a strike, but I don’t think his parents were 100% grateful for my advice.

Justin is a renaissance man who can discuss a wide range of topics. This evening he got me up to speed on the presidential and vice-presidential debates, his take on politics, and other world affairs. He cannot believe that the politicians believe what comes out of their own mouths because it’s all a pack of lies. Romney’s “economic plan”? Complete hogwash. His dad courageously undertook explaining trickle down economics, and we questioned its validity as we’ve been waiting for money to trickle down since Reagan was in office in the 80s.

We revisited the issues with his school’s student government, which as it turns out is a complete sham because the adults don’t listen to the kids at all. The kids come in with all kinds of energy and great ideas, but ultimately they can’t pull off anything. The adults even ruin Spirit Day, which should unequivocally be in the hands of the kids.

We went on to discuss a topic near and dear to my heart, food. Justin’s mom sometimes packs a donut in his lunchbox as an extra treat, but the chocolate icing all comes off on the plastic bag and he gets chocolate all over his arm and it’s kind of a disaster. We weighed the pros and cons of licking the frosting off the plastic bag and decided ultimately it’s not worth the social stigma.

Justin had a hypothetical question about the M&M diet that I wrote about a while back. Could the M&Ms be consumed in different formats? Like drinking melted M&Ms or making cookies out of M&Ms? After some thought I advised that as long as everything is made entirely of M&Ms, it would pass muster.

We discussed various TV shows; everything from iCarly to I Love Lucy. We discussed the High Holidays and weighed the wisdom of being bad all year since you can always atone at the end of the year. We talked about world religion, and how girls have cooties. We talked about how many cookies Santa and his reindeer could eat in one evening and still manage to fly all over the place. We discussed whether it might be a good idea to leave out beer and pork rinds for Santa rather than milk and cookies, to give Santa a little variety. All of this was hypothetical of course, because Justin doesn’t believe in Santa.

We covered a lot of ground, but there is still so much to discuss. Hope to see you again soon Justin, and we can discuss the horrible, oppressive conditions under which you must live because of your completely unreasonable parents. I feel your pain.